


Miles to Go Before I Sleep

by eleanorigby



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-25
Updated: 2013-11-25
Packaged: 2018-01-02 14:07:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1057693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleanorigby/pseuds/eleanorigby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Turn Left!Rose Tyler remembers when life was easy, carefree, beautiful, and the whole of creation was within her easy grasp.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Miles to Go Before I Sleep

“M’am.”

“Oh, don’t, please, don’t.” Rose stopped her pacing and whipped around to face the Captain.

“Honestly, I don’t know what else to call you—” Rose raised her eyebrows impatiently and the Captain cut herself off midsentence. “We’ve found another place the TARDIS landed.”

Rose went straight to the computers. She didn’t run; she walked, as fast as she could without seeming too eager, without tripping over wires, without looking unprofessional. She wanted to run. She wanted to run as fast as she could, and never stop running until she found the Doctor and all of this was put right and she was back where she belonged, but she wouldn’t do it, because she was in charge here. Rose Tyler was the new Doctor, and if walking calmly was all she could do to act like him, she was going to do it.

All of the computers were scanning through data at lightning speeds except for one, right in the middle of the row, which had stopped. Rose braced herself as she went to it, knowing, deep down, that it wouldn’t help. Whatever the new puzzle piece was, it was without a doubt one at the center of the design, where it wouldn’t fit onto anything she’d already figured out. That was how this always happened, naturally. So she straightened her jacket and shook her hair out of her eyes and put on her poker face, trying not to show anybody how jittery she felt down to her core. It was probably something about Donna Noble; she’d been finding bits and pieces about Ms. Noble for months—

No, she recognized those words on the screen. She’d been to that place, she was sure—she’d been with the Doctor. This was way back; this wasn’t a place the TARDIS had taken Donna Noble, because this was a place the TARDIS had taken Rose Tyler. She slid into the seat at the monitor, clicked through a few pages, typed in a few commands, and brought up a picture of the coordinates from the search. Oh, sure, she remembered these woods. Snowy all year round, the Doctor had said. Safest planet he knew, too. He’d said they needed a rest.

\---

“You’re taking us somewhere safe.” Rose spat out the word safe like it was abhorrent. She was only half kidding. Danger was in the job description, right?

“Yes, I’m taking you somewhere safe,” the Doctor replied, flicking switches at the console. “I told Jackie I’d keep you in one piece, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, but you’re not doing a very good job of it, anyway.”

“Well, we’re taking a break. Catch our breath somewhere where everything isn’t out to kill us, for a change.”

“Might be nice.”

“Yeah. Might be.” The Doctor looked up and gave Rose that grin she was always looking for—the big, silly smile that reminded her why she loved this so much—and he pulled the last lever dramatically, launching the TARDIS into the time vortex.

When everything went well—which, admittedly, wasn’t as often as it should have been—the TARDIS was only ever in motion for that first lurch before it lurched again and landed—and everything seemed to be going well today. Rose was laughing as the Doctor pulled her back to her feet from where his reckless flying had thrown her to the ground; she collapsed against him, still giggling, feeling entirely at home with her back pressed up against that brown pinstriped suit the Doctor loved so much.

“Well, go on, then,” he urged, setting her back up on her feet and nodding towards the closet. “Winter coats and snow boots, that’s the uniform for today.”

Rose pulled him with her as she sprinted off towards the arena they called a closet, an excitable whirlwind of blonde hair and blue jeans as she ran through the walkways to the coats and winter wear, and then as she pulled them out one by one to find the perfect coat for this one day. For some reason, she felt like it was going to be perfect, like it had to be perfect, and who was she to argue with a funny feeling?

“No, stop, go back,” the Doctor said. He was there at the other end of the rack, laughing with her and shrugging on his trench coat. “Jo’s—the grey one.”

“This one?”

“No, that one—that one, right there. Brilliant!”

Rose pulled the coat on over her hoodie and wrapped a scarf around her neck. The Doctor had nearly described the coat she was wearing as being Jo’s. She looked down at it again. Vintage, she thought with a smile. Most of the clothes she wore at this point weren’t even hers. She didn’t know to whom most of them belonged, but the Doctor did. Every time she came out with a new pair of shoes she’d get a big smile and a story about the shoes’ finest hour, on the feet of some girl from London in the seventies, and Rose would listen and laugh as the Doctor recounted his adventures, and she’d look away when the smile faded and he remembered why the shoes had ended up ownerless on the rack in the closet. It hardly bothered her anymore that the clothes were reminders of past girls who’d lived as she did. She didn’t get jealous anymore. She was the Doctor’s and the Doctor was hers and that was how life was, and nothing could change that.

Rose’s favorite cushy snow boots were tossed on top of the rest of the boots from the last time she’d worn them, and she pulled them on as the Doctor stood by and supervised, still in his red Chucks. “You’re not going to wear your own snow boots?” Rose asked, knowing the answer.

The Doctor gave her a look like she’d asked the stupidest question he’d ever heard. “I am a Time Lord. I don’t need boots.”

“Suit yourself,” Rose shrugged as she pulled on a pair of glove-mittens and a hat with earflaps. “But I’m not giving you mine if your feet freeze off.”

She reached up into his massively unruly hair and pulled his face towards hers to kiss him gently. She probably would give up her boots to save his feet. He’d be no good without his stupid red trainers.

Outside the TARDIS it was a veritable winter wonderland. The snow glimmered from every surface, and in the afternoon sun it was bordering on blinding. But it was a good kind of blinding, the way that cloud-gazing on a summer’s day is blinding, and you don’t want to look away because it’s part of the fun. Everywhere was white, and everywhere was hushed, and the snow blanketed the woods in a perfect quiet that Rose and the Doctor would naturally do everything in their power to break.

“Ha-ha!” Rose squealed as soon as she stepped out of the police-box doors and into the six inches of snow that covered the entire forest floor. “Look at this! This is beautiful!”

“Oh, it’s brilliant,” the Doctor raved. “Brilliant! Look, a planet-wide winter wonderland. What could be better?” He closed the door behind them and wrapped his arm around Rose’s shoulder.

“Planet-wide?”

“Whole planet, just like this! Well, I mean, there are mountains, and valleys, and oceans, but the whole place is just this beautiful. It’s a madhouse around Christmas, let me tell you. Tourists everywhere. But middle of spring, we should be fine—”

Rose listened to the Doctor babble while she gazed around at the trees and the snow, because, honestly, that’s all there was. Trees. And snow. And it was amazing. She’d been to New New New New New New New New New New New New New New York and the end of the Earth and all that, and this was a planet made up of two things, and it made it work. She watched their feet make perfect imprints in the snow—and she realized it was snowball snow.

Faster than you could blink, Rose had pulled away from the Doctor and was fashioning a ball out of a handful of snow from right underneath them. It took him a moment to realize what she was doing, and by the time he had, she was finished, and his protests did nothing to stop the flight of the snowball right at his face.

“Rose!” he sputtered, wiping snow from his eyes and flicking it to the ground. Rose launched another snowball at his chest and collapsed into howls of laughter against a big pine tree behind her, closing her eyes. She loved this. This was easy and natural, and—

“Never let your guard down, Rose,” the Doctor hissed as Rose felt him press up against her, pinning her to the tree with his lips and stuffing heinous amounts of snow down her neck and through her coat.

“Ahhhh!” she squealed, pulling away just for a moment, just out of shock, before she realized that was where she wanted to be anyway, soaked hoodie or not. So she pulled him back towards her and kissed him furiously, laughing internally at the snowflakes that still caked his eyelashes and the cold streaks of water that were making their way onto her own face from his forehead and hair.

She never wanted to let go. She never wanted to stop feeling as bright, as radiant as she did when she had the Doctor pressing her against a pine tree in a wintry forest on a wintry planet far away from home. She never wanted to stop feeling important, and perfect, and needed, and wanted, so Rose tangled her fingers into the Doctor’s mane of brown hair, and she kissed him harder, relishing the feel of his hands on her hips, on her back, on her everything.

He pulled away after a minute, took her hand and spun her away from the tree, and she let out a peal of pleased laughter. “I feel like I’m trespassing,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Like the poem, Stopping by Woods or something?”

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, yeah,” Rose supplied. “I had to memorize it for school. It is a bit, yeah. Feels like this place belongs to somebody.”

“Come on, then,” the Doctor said. “Let’s go find a place that belongs to us. Allons-y!”

“Allons-y!”

\---

Rose opened her eyes, though she hadn’t realized she’d closed them. It had been a long time since she’d closed her eyes, actually, now that she thought about it. She had her head propped up on her elbows propped up on a computer desk in a dark warehouse without the Doctor, she reminded herself. The days of snowy forests and sunny days were long gone.

“M’am?”

“Right, yeah,” Rose said, pulling herself up reluctantly out of the chair. “Yeah, I, um, I remember that trip. Get what you can out of it, but I don’t think it’s going to be much.”

The Captain nodded, and Rose went to the TARDIS. She knew they were all watching her. She’d let down her professional guard, but she didn’t care. She wanted to yell and scream and break things and collapse on the ground and cry, and the only place she could do that was the TARDIS, so she went inside and shut the door, and couldn’t bring herself even to walk further than the steps before she sank to the ground and clung to the railing, tears streaming down her face.

The TARDIS was familiar. She’d spent years in the TARDIS, learning where to step down and where to step up and where to step around, so that she knew the place like the back of her hand, and could navigate it just as well with her eyes closed. The TARDIS was her home, and right now she wanted to find her bedroom and hide in it for all eternity, because she felt safe here. Danger was all well and good with the Doctor around, but without him—well. All she wanted was to find somewhere safe and take a break.

She couldn’t, though. She knew that. There were people out there who counted on her to make their lives make sense, and if she showed them that her own hardly made any, she’d lose their trust completely. She couldn’t do that, not ever. So she pulled herself up and caught her breath against the railing.

Like the poem, she thought, wiping her eyes. Just like the poem.

Rose pushed open the TARDIS door and stepped back into her daily routine, forcing herself to give orders and look put-together, while inside she was chanting that verse she’d memorized so long ago, that had used to mean something so bright and sweet, and now was spoiled for good, just from living it.

_These woods are lovely, dark and deep,_

_But I have promises to keep, ___

_And miles to go before I sleep, ___

_And miles to go before I sleep. ___


End file.
